Average Response Time

In depth

Average response time (ART) measures how quickly a team replies across a whole conversation, not just at the start. As the formula shows, it is the sum of all response times divided by the number of responses. For a single conversation that gives the average gap between the customer's messages and the agent's replies; reported as a metric, those per-conversation figures are averaged across many conversations over a period.

That "every reply" scope is what makes it distinct from first response time, which measures only the wait for the very first reply. The difference is easy to picture: a team can acknowledge a customer within seconds, posting an excellent first response time, and then let each follow-up message sit for twenty minutes. First response time would look great; average response time would tell the truer story of a conversation that stalled after a promising start.

It is also narrower than a resolution metric. Average response time is about the pace of replies, whereas average resolution time is about how long until the issue is finally solved. A conversation can have snappy responses and still take days to resolve if it is waiting on a third party, which is why teams read the two together rather than treating one as a proxy for the other.

What counts in average response time?

The metric counts the time before each agent reply, so the way you handle the gaps in between matters. Two choices shape the number. The first is whether you measure in calendar time or business hours: a customer who replies at midnight should not make the next morning's response look slow, so most teams pause the clock outside working hours.

The second is what happens while you are waiting on the customer. Average response time should capture the time your team takes to reply, not the time a customer takes to get back to you, so those customer-side gaps are excluded. Reported across a period, the figure is usually broken down by channel, because a prompt reply on live chat and a prompt reply on email are measured on very different scales.

What's a good average response time?

There is no single benchmark. What counts as good depends on the channel and on what your customers expect: a live chat is judged in minutes, while email is commonly measured in hours. A response time that feels slow in a chat window can be perfectly reasonable over email.

The most useful target is one your team can sustain across an entire conversation, not just the opening reply, and across your real volume rather than a quiet day. Track the trend over time, and pair it with a satisfaction score so a quick average response time reflects customers who felt looked after throughout, not just greeted quickly and then left waiting.